W. G. Collingwood - Drangey in 1897 (National Museum of Iceland)
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Happy New Year everyone, a new year that is not so new as it once was and is now tipping well into the slog of mid-January, but it is my first episode of the year, so I’ll wish you a happy new year nonetheless. I hope that yours was a pleasant one and that your festive season passed without troubles or hauntings. As we’ve now well-established, such hopes were not always realized in Grettir’s world where, long before the Victorian tradition, holiday hauntings seemed to crop up with some regularity. So we saw with the sequence of events that culminated in Grettir’s fight with Glamr and the life-altering curse that resulted. So we’ll now see again.
There were to be more Christmas hauntings, found in the edition I’m using under the helpful chapter heading of “More Christmas Hauntings,” and they make, as many of these sections do, for a little story all of their own.
The whole thing had started two years before, two Christmases before, when a woman named Steinvor travelled to Christmas mass, leaving her husband at home. That night, there were many fearful noises heard in the darkness of their home, but no one wished to go investigate. No one dared to. And the next morning, when Steinvor returned, her husband had disappeared, with no one having any idea what had become of him.
The following year, Steinvor had again set out to Christmas mass. She had no husband now, but she told a farmhand to stay and mind the home. It sounds like he was a bit reluctant, maybe thinking about all that might have happened to that husband of hers, but he agreed that she should decide matters, and he stayed. Much like the year before, there were noises in the night, and much like the year before, when Steinvor returned, the farmhand was missing, but this time there was blood at the entranceway, and many said that a monster must have taken him. When the following Christmas came, our Grettir entered the story.
He had heard tell of the Christmas hauntings, and despite his downright terrible experiences in previously involving himself with such things, in the Glamr matter, he decided to involve himself again. He arrived on the eve of Christmas, presenting himself only under the name of Guest. He said that he wished to stay, waved away Steinvor’s very fair warnings as to his safety, and offered to first see her on her way to Christmas mass. He carried her and her daughter across a freezing river that at its deepest ran up to his shoulders, and then he went back to her home, getting there just before the arrival of the dark which he feared so—maybe the reason he’d insisted on carrying both of them over at once rather than making two trips. He barricaded the rest of the household safely away at one end of the hall, and he waited. I feel like a lot of this saga has involved people waiting for some kind of intruder or another in this more or less Beowulf-like fashion.
In this case, the intruder arrived in the form of an enormous troll, in one of her hands a trough—for eating the victim?—and a cleaver in the other. The fight took all night, was, it sounds, essentially a hellishly prolonged grappling match that made wreckage of the hall and tumbled out into night, surely causing those Grettir had safely barricaded away to pull their blankets up a little tighter, and only concluding when he freed his sword hand by the waterfall cliff’s edge and cut off the troll’s arm, sending her tumbling down into the waters. The day of Christmas itself, he spent recovering, and on the next, he ventured after her, finishing what he’d started, killing the giant he found behind the falls and returning with the bones of two men, presumably those of Steinvor’s husband and farmhand from the previous holidays, though one wonders what the monster ate outside of that season.
Grettir spent the winter there with Steinvor before word of his location spread to his enemies and he was again forced to move on. Late in the summer, Steinvor gave birth to a boy. By 15 years of age, when he was reckoned the strongest in northern Iceland, it was realized that the child had been Grettir’s. It was thought that he surely must have greatness ahead of him, but at 16 he was dead, and there was, the saga tells us, “no saga about him.” Most things that Grettir involved himself with, particularly late in life, did not work out, and by this time, he was already long dead himself.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast which covers medieval history through the stories of its travellers, and a podcast that is supported by a Patreon at patreon.com/humancircus, a place where you’ll hear early, ad-free, and extra episodes, and really help me out in the process. Thank you, all of you who have already done so, and a special thank you to newest Patreon supporter Mae Walters in particular. I very much appreciate it.
And now, back to the story, to the conclusion not quite of the saga itself but at least of Grettir’s part in it, something which grew increasingly longer than intended as I worked on it. I usually aim for 30-40 minute episodes, but as this one moved ever closer to 60, I decided to split it into two parts. So today, you get Part One of the end of Grettir. Next week is Part Two.
When last we spoke, Grettir had been living here and there, usually by virtue of his ability to take what he wanted, occasionally in a more honest and self-sufficient manner. He was driven out from most of society, just as he was driven to need it because of that curse, caused to often keep unhealthy, downright threatening, company as a result. Under rather peculiar circumstances he found a friend in Hallmund, but then he lost him, a loss he wouldn’t learn of right away, for he was often now in the barren interior of Iceland, not a place for polite society or the easy spread of news.
The loss was something Grettir would only hear about now, a few years after it had happened and too late to avenge Hallmund’s death, for Grim, the killer, had already moved on. Around the same time he learned of the death of Thorstein, the farmer who he had stayed with early in his time as an outlaw and had often sought advice from. He began to feel that many of those who had been close to him were being cut down. Perhaps it was all part of that oft-mentioned ill fortune of his.
With revenge for Hallmund not an option, Grettir travelled to his family home and briefly saw his little brother and his mother, Asdis. He fought off yet another attempt on his life but left the attacker alive, for the assailant’s father was an influential man and he did not wish for another of those to be after him. He had enough of that to deal with already and few enough options as it was.
From a man named Gudmund the Powerful, he looked for help. Gudmund did not wish to take him in and play host—why would he?—but he did offer advice. “The most important thing for you,” he said, “is to find yourself a place where you will not be afraid for your life.” He suggested an island in Skagafjord, Iceland’s north, a small island named Dragney. It was unapproachable save by ladders, he said, and very easily defended from attack as long as one kept watch.
“I will try this,” said Grettir, “but I have become so scared of the dark that I cannot for the life of me stand being alone.”
“Be that as it may,” said Gudmund, “trust no one so well that you do not rely best on yourself.”
Who else could he now trust?
This was the matter he talked over with his mother, echoing his earlier complaint that he could not stand being alone, not even to save his life. That was where that little brother of his came in. His little brother Illugi, now grown to fifteen years old and counted, in this context, already “a very capable man,” and eager to go with Grettir to the island. I don’t know what help you may find me, he told his big brother, but you will be able to trust me, to count on me to stay by your side while I remain standing.
For Grettir, that was more than enough, and their mother, Asdis, caught between seeing both her sons depart and seeing the one go without aid or hope, somewhat reluctantly agreed that it would be best if they went together. With these words she wished them farewell:
“Now, my two sons, you are leaving. You will share the same death, and this will be my greatest sorrow. Still, no one can escape the fate that has been shaped for them. I will never see either of you again, but let yourselves share one end. I do not know what luck you will find on Drangey, but there you will leave your bones, and many will begrudge you your stay. Keep your eyes open for treachery; nevertheless, you will be cut down by weapons. I have had a strange dream, and so I say to you, be on your guard against witchcraft. Few things are more powerful than the old ways of sorcery.”
And so saying, she began to weep.
Grettir assured her that it would be said, so long as they were attacked with weapons, that she had given birth to sons and not daughters, but as a note of departure, it was a bleak one. As the beginning of a journey, it was ominous.
The journey itself went fine. The brothers trekked through heavy snows from one relative’s home to another, encountering no trouble, no sign of any of their many enemies as they went. They even picked up some friendly help along the way, a curious fellow nicknamed Glaum, a “tall, thin, and poorly clothed” man who saw them pass and then asked to join their company, promising to work for them if they’d let him. “...a lone vagrant, who did not much like working and was given boasting. Some people found him amusing and he was the butt of jokes.” Grettir at least found him amusing and agreed that he could join them. He had heard Gudmund’s advice, and indeed the life-lessons of his time as an outlaw, that he should not trust so easily, but he does not seem to have heeded it. The party, now three, found a farmer not so unwilling to boat them across to the island that their money couldn’t convince him, and with Grettir now 15 or 16 winters an outlaw, they reached their destination.
The island of Drangey was everything that he had been promised. Large enough to be visible on Google maps if you zoom some ways in, it still is, featuring cliffs that rise steeply from the sea below to a tabletop plateau above, the path that now allows walking access not then existent. There are legends of giant trolls caught out on the water by the sunlight and turned to stone, the cow they were leading across the fjord frozen with them and forming our island. In one 19th-century text, I’ve seen a related story, of a boat which carried a witch out to the island when Grettir was there. The boat sank, drowning the woman, and a rock in the form of a ship in sail rose in that spot next to Drangey. It’s a story that seems to combine the trollish legend with the coming of a quote/unquote witch into the story, something we’ll see next time.
On a less legendary note, the island is a former volcano and home to species of birds in abundance that traditionally had locals flocking to it for eggs and fowl. That’s what the brothers and their new helper found there, swarms of seabirds, cliffs that required ladders to climb, and a population of sheep, kept there by farmers from the mainland, farmers who were not going to be particularly happy about the islands’ new occupants.
That was why Grettir had needed to pay a substantial amount for them to be brought across by night and why there were sure to be difficulties ahead. It was an uninhabited island that they’d chosen for their new home, but not one in which the locals were uninterested. As pointed out in the note which accompanies Fox and Pálsson’s translation, the single most important cop of the period and place was quite simply grass, fodder, feed, the lack of abundant land to produce it going some way to explain why this awkward-to-access offshore supply had value and why the trouble to come is set up in the saga with an introduction of the local families and figures who were invested in the island, its sheep, and its grasses, in this detail or that, that one was the son of Bjorn, son of Thin-Beard, son of the man who was given “the tongue lands below the marsh at [Swampy Hollow].” That kind of thing.
Of one man, it was said that “he was a chieftain, a man of noble bearing, and he was popular.” Of his brother Thorbjorn Hook, that he had lost an eye when their of-course cruel step mother, who was cruelest to him, aimed to smack him in the cheek with a game piece only to have the piece skip up into his eyeball and pop it out onto the cheek.
That winter solstice brought these men and more to Drangey, but when they reached the cliffs, they found the ladders had been pulled up from above. Who had come to their island? They shouted and called until Grettir showed himself above and, far from hiding who he was, identified himself by name. He wouldn’t lower the ladders, he let the men below know. He wouldn’t let them have their sheep, and he wouldn’t leave the island, no matter what terms they offered, from a free trip to the mainland and the sheep he’d already slaughtered free of charge to all manner of offers and inducements that they tried throughout the day. Eventually, they left, grumbling first among themselves and then to the people of the district “that a wolf was now on the island.” They were clearly discontented after their encounter with Grettir, but there was little they could do for now. They would wait and they would see, and we will see too after this quick break.
…
After that first encounter on the island the matter was left to simmer, stirred up just a little the next summer by Grettir himself.
Grettir would not entirely keep to his island home. Maybe it was boredom that brought him over to the mainland during the assembly of the thing, a time when all local worthies would be in attendance. Maybe he was looking to further assert himself over them. He didn’t put on a big show, not exactly, but then, when you were as large and imposing as he was supposed to be, just sitting there all hooded and mysterious during the wrestling matches was enough to draw attention. As he had that Christmas when first speaking to Steinvor, he initially announced himself only as Guest, at first said he had no interest in taking part in the wrestling, insisted on the swearing of a truce by those present before he would be willing to reveal himself and take part, which he then did.
There were those who wanted to break the truce then, and there was much mumbling and wagging of beards to that effect, a scene which Grettir laughed at and an opportunity for another one of his verses:
“Many a meritorious farmer
missed my incognito.
Fleeting indecision
fogged their pugnacious minds.
They found the tables turned,
these harshly spoken heroes:
their deeds don’t match their speeches.
All Hafur’s drivel dried up.”
He mocked them, but a mighty oath of peace had been sworn that had gone on at some length, an oath for really lingering over and speaking aloud.
Quote:
“Be he a cursed trucebreaker who breaks this truce or destroys this trust, expelled from God and good men, driven out from the Kingdom of Heaven and away from all holy men. Let him find nowhere suitable to live among men and so be driven out from the company of all, as wolves are driven furthest, wherever Christians seek their churches, heathens sacrifice in temples, fire burns, the earth grows, a speaking child calls to its mother, a mother bears a son, people kindle fires, ships advance, shields glimmer, the sun shines, snow lies, the Lapp moves on skis, pines grow, and falcons fly throughout the long spring day with a good wind under both wings, where heaven turns, where the world is settled, where the wind provides water for the sea, and slaves sow grain. He shall be barred from churches and the company of Christians, from heathen farmers, and from house, cave, and every world except from Hell.”
It was the sort of thing that one could not easily go back on and certainly not without negative consequences for your future dealings if it were to spread around, as it would, that you were not one to keep to your sworn word. In the end, the locals kept to their oath, and Grettir wrestled their strongest, two brothers at the same time. All agreed that they put on a tremendous display, and after it was done, Grettir returned without incident to his island home.
As time passed, those with interest in Drangey island began to dwindle. There had been about 20 of them to start with, but they saw that while Grettir was there their share was worthless, and they moreover had no intention of doing anything to remove him. Better, they seemed to think, to leave the island to someone who would.
That someone turned out to be one of the brothers who Grettir had wrestled, the Thorbjorn Hook previously seen having his eye popped out and now benefiting from the others’ unwillingness. “Big, strong, ruthless, and difficult to deal with,” with his willingness to pry the intruder from the island, he stood to profit, but only if he could actually get rid of Grettir, for that had been the stipulation of those who had relinquished their shares. It was a big “if.”
As that summer drew to a close, Thorbjorn Hook sailed out to Drangey for another bellowed conversation with its new occupants. Grettir and his brother, along with their helper, increasingly referred to in the text as a slave, up on the clifftops, Thorbjorn down below at the edge of the water. He’d been there before with the others who’d first tried to bargain with Grettir. Now he did so independently.
He asked Grettir to do him the favour of leaving, something Grettir replied would never happen. He informed Grettir that he was now holder of most of the shares in the island, most of the farmers having transferred their shares to him, and as such he would be in a strong position to aid Grettir in return, if only he would just leave. But Grettir shouted down that this only made him more obstinately set on never leaving. I used to find it difficult that all the farmers of the district came against me, he said, but now that it was Thorbjorn alone, there was, quote, “no longer reason for moderation.” As far as Grettir was concerned, the matter was settled.
“Each awaits his appointed hour,” went Thorbjorn’s parting words, “and you can expect trouble.”
“I will take that chance,” answered Grettir.
There on the island, he and his younger brother were content. By two winters in, they had slaughtered basically the entire sheep population, which seems a little short sighted, but between the birds and their eggs they had plenty of food still, and they had the company of the one ram who they‘d let live. Grey-bellied and large-horned, it had become tame to their presence, waiting outside their hut for them to come out, running after them wherever they went, coming home to the hut in the evening and announcing itself with horns banged against the door. Apparently “it provided them with many humorous moments.” It was all very nice.
Less blissful than the brothers’ time together with their pet ram was that of Glaum, the slave. One gets the sense that they were increasingly tired of him and his unreliability and he with his lot in life, this turn, for which he had volunteered but which saw him labouring in the service of an outlaw on a remote island location that he could not actually leave, for they had no boat of their own to take him. His complaints grew in step with his carelessness.
One of his main responsibilities was that of the fire. There was little wood on the island, only what driftwood found its way to them, and Glaum had to gather it and to attend the fire every night. But then one night he didn’t, and the fire went out.
I must admit, I’m not totally clear on why this was such a tremendous issue. Like I understand when you’re in the middle of a storm as happened leading up to the hall-burning in the previous episode. But here, you’ve got the recent embers of a fire, and you couldn’t get something going with that? Apparently you couldn’t. Apparently, the situation was such that only by reaching the mainland and fetching fire could the problem be resolved, a significant obstacle given their boatless situation.
Grettir raged against Glaum and declared that he ought to be whipped. Glaum, for his part, grumbled that things were bad enough for him as it was, without any whippings, staying there an outlaw and blamed for everything that went wrong. The nickname of Glaum apparently meant “noisy merrymaking,” but certainly there was none of that now, and were it an option, they probably should have parted ways with him entirely.
Maybe Grettir had become rather too accustomed to having someone there to do his bidding—he had been prone to such periods of laziness before, many of them in fact. Maybe he and Illugi simply waited for the right opportunity to be rid of the man, something somewhere short of just killing him. If so, they were going to wait for too long.
As to their present dilemma, for Illugi the only option was to wait for the next time a boat came by, but there were risks to that approach. There was every likelihood that nobody friendly was coming on that next boat if indeed it was to come soon enough at all. Grettir said that he would rather swim for the fire, repeating his trick from before, and in the end, despite Illugi’s misgivings at the prospect of being abandoned on the island if Grettir couldn’t manage the freezing cold and roughly 6.5 km swim, that’s what he did. Like the previous time he’d swum for fire, something went wrong, something which he was much more directly to blame for than the accident at the hall, though it’s hard to tell in the specific context of the saga exactly how this was meant to be viewed and understood.
What I’m talking about here reads clearly as sexual assault to us now, but in reading how it’s presented in the saga, it’s not clear how it would have been received, how it would be seen and judged, probably not how we would judge the sexual violence of Grettir against a servant-woman who mocked his penis-size as he lay passed out and partially uncovered after the swim.
Sexual violence in the sagas often seems to be a blood-feud offence, so I’m not saying that it was generally condoned or went unrecognized, but it was primarily seen as an offence against the male relatives, not so much the women who had actually been assaulted, and it’s unclear how or if that would be seen to apply here. It seems, given her status as a farm’s maidservant, that she might not really fit into this saga-world in that way at all. So we just see the farmer’s daughter reprimanding her when she first begins to mock Grettir, and then afterward, we see Grettir going off to arrange transport back to the island with the farmer himself, apparently a very amiable exchange. As the episode concludes, there’s nothing that indicates any negative judgment of what he’d done at the farm. We are just told that people marvelled that Grettir had made the swim from Drangey, and that they grumbled, not about what he had done, but about the fact that Thorbjorn hadn’t yet removed Grettir from the island.
Thorbjorn was going to have another try at that though, as a new arrival in the district offered a new opportunity.
This came in the form of a young Norwegian named Haering, a man of unusual agility who was probably capable of all sorts of things but of most interest to Thorbjorn could climb any cliff. And honestly that doesn’t seem like the hardest part of the job, in looking to dislodge someone like Grettir, but Thorbjorn thought it well worth another effort, and he went back to Drangey yet again, taking the Norwegian with him.
This time his ship dropped off Haering at one point on the cliffs and then circled around to another, where Thorbjorn shouted for Grettir and the others to come and speak with him, to question, promise, goad, provoke, and whatever else would hold the attention of the three at the top of the cliffs while Haering picked his way up the steep climb, trying one spot after another, making back and forth across the rock face until he found his way up. Everyone else was still noisily arguing. Nobody noticed him until Illugi happened to glance back
“A man with a raised axe is just behind us,” he said, “and to me his intentions seem unfriendly.”
While Grettir watched the ladder, Illugi turned to face their would-be attacker, and Haering, who was only here for hitting people in the back, turned and fled. Across the island he ran, and when he came to the cliffs, he kept going, leaving the location with the name “Haering’s Leap” to go along with all the “Grettir’s Lift”s that the story had resulted in. Illugi went back to tell Grettir that their assailant hadn’t wanted to leave matters to him, so he’d broken his back on the rocks below, and Thorbjorn, hearing what had happened, turned his ship for home, saying he would not return to Drangey unless matters changed. Still, he predicted that Grettir’s remaining time on the island would be shorter than that which had passed.
It seemed at that moment rather optimistic of Thorbjorn Hook to make any such predictions of the kind, for he had hardly made any headway in shifting Grettir from his island, had hardly shown signs that such a thing was likely, or even possibly within his reach, but as we’ll see next time, the tide of Grettir’s fortune, long turned against him, would soon send waves that were going to swirl around his ankles and tug at his feet, pulling him toward the end. And it must be said that to quite a large extent he was going to have himself to blame. That is perhaps not by this point any great surprise.
Thank you for listening to this, part one of Grettir’s conclusion. I’ll be back here very soon with part two.
Sources:
Grettir's Saga, translated by Jesse Byock. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Grettir's Saga, translated by Denton Fox and Hermann Palsson. University of Toronto Press, 1974.
Ljungqvist, Fredrik Charpentier. "Rape in the Icelandic Sagas: An Insight in the Perceptions about Sexual Assaults on Women in the Old Norse World," in Journal of Family History, 40(4), 431–447.
Tweedie, Ethel Brilliana. A Girl's Ride in Iceland. Horace Cox, 1895.